Best Buy Opening Digital Development Center

SEATTLE — Best Buy will continue to invest in its online and mobile commerce capabilities with the opening this spring of a digital development center, here.

The 32,000-square-foot sublet facility will be located on the top floor of The Seattle Times headquarters building, and will eventually house more than 100 engineers, product managers, web architects and developers.

The team will focus on mobile, private Cloud and omnichannel app development, and will supplement the work of the e-commerce and enterprise IT crews at Best Buy headquarters in Minneapolis.

The goal, the company said, is to leverage digital technology to drive a comprehensive customer experience and growth across all sales channels.

“Establishing this development office is significant for BestBuy.com,” said Mary Lou Kelley, the retailer’s e-commerce president. “The work done in this office will lead the transformation of the omnichannel experience for our customers.

She added: “We intend for our colleagues in this office to drive breakthrough innovation at incredible scale, for the world’s largest consumer electronics retailer.”

Best Buy currently employees over 150 full-time ecommerce engineers and product managers and several hundred contract workers in Minnesota. Over the past two years the group has used Cloud technologies and practices to support increased scale and the rapid growth of e-commerce traffic from mobile devices, and successfully deployed an OpenStack Cloud internally.